The present invention relates to the field of tag attaching devices and, more particularly, to an improved device for dispensing tag pins made of a plastic and dispensed in attaching price tags, labels or the like to a variety of pieces of merchandise.
Plastic-made tag pins, which are today widely utilized in, for example, anchoring various tags or the like to various goods, are individually composed of a head, a crossbar and a filament interconnecting the head and the crossbar, altogether forming a substantially H-shaped integral body. Further, a plurality of such tag pins are integrally arranged at predetermined intervals or at a predetermined pitch in the thickness direction of the head for example to altogether form a comb-like assembly. That is to say, a multiplicity of individual tag pins are connected about their joint portions to a common connecting bar alike a multiplicity of teeth in a comb. In greater detail, each tag pin has a joint portion connected to and extending from its crossbar, and through such joint portion, it is connected to a connecting bar common to all individual tag pins in a tag pin assembly.
Today, tag pins of various sizes and configurations are commercially available, and a variety of tag pin assemblies are commercially utilized, which have variously different pitches in the arrangement of individual tag pins.
The tag attaching device to which the present invention more directly relates than a tag pin or tag pin assembly per se is a device having an overall structure resembling a pistol and is adapted to separate and dispense individual tag pins of a tag pin assembly one at a time relative to items of merchandise. In operation with the device, a tag pin severed out of the assembly is guided with its crossbar through a hollow needle of the device having an elongated slot and is driven to penetrate a tag or a preparatively provided hole of the latter and also an objective item of merchandise so as thereby to have the tag attached to the objective merchandise item.
In conventional tag attaching devices, a feeding device is provided, which includes a gear having gear teeth adapted to engage the joint portion of tag pins and in which by the action of the gear individual tag pins of a tag pin assembly charged in the device are intermittently successively fed to the hollow needle. The gear has only a constant pitch of gear teeth, therefore the tag attaching device cannot be effectively employed for dispensing such tag pin assemblies as having a pitch of the tag pin arrangement not corresponding to the pitch of the gear teeth of its feeding device. Thus, in order to carry out tag attaching operations with a variety of tag pin assemblies having different pitches of the tag pin arrangement, it is today indispensable to provide a corresponding variety of tag attaching devices having different pin-feeding gear teeth pitches.